"Creativity, Community & Collaboration"

Profile

Dr.Ganesh Natarajan

Dr. Ganesh Natarajan is Executive Chairman and Founder of 5F World, a platform for Skills, Start-ups and Social Ventures in the country. He is also Chairman of Global Talent Track, a pioneer in Employability Skills Training in Asia.

Ganesh has two significant corporate success stories to his credit - APTECH a global training major which he led for ten years and Zensar Technologies, a global software success story which he led as its Vice Chairman & CEO till early 2016.

Ganesh’s industry responsibilities include Chairman of NASSCOM Foundation, President of the HBS Club of India and a member of the National Council of the CII. Ganesh is a Global Board Director of Social Venture Partners and Convener of SVP Pune.

Author of nine books and a sought after speaker at national and international forums, he believes in the triple bottom line approach to management and leadership.

Ganesh & NASSCOM

Ganesh Natarajan is the Vice Chairman of Zensar Technologies, a NASSCOM Top 15 IT Services company, that transforms technology and processes for Fortune 500 companies. He is the Vice President of the HBS Club of India. Ganesh chairs Innovation, Intellectual Property and Knowledge for the Confederation of Indian Industry and is a member of the Chairmens' Council of industry association NASSCOM. He was Chairman of NASSCOM in 2008-09.

After completing his Mechanical Engineering with a gold medal in 1979 from BIT Mesra, Ganesh went on to be a gold medalist in Industrial Engineering from NITIE and later also did a PhD in Knowledge Management at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School. Ganesh was conferred with the Asia Pac Entrepreneur Award by Enterprise Asia in 2010 and has also been recognized by Ernst & Young for exceptional leadership. He is the author of four McGraw Hill Books on Business Process Re-engineering and Knowledge Management and is also a regular columnist for IT industry and business papers and magazines.- See more at: https://www.nasscomfoundation.org/who-we-are/leadership/478-ganesh-natarajan.html#sthash.xxxfJOm0.dpuf

Ganesh & NES

Natarajan Education Society(NES) has been established by Dr Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman of the National Knowledge Committee of the CII. member of the Chairmen's Council of NASSCOM and a member of the Management Board of the multi-billion dollar RPG Enterprises where he heads the IT sector and is Vice Chairman of Zensar Technologies Ltd. NES has been named after Ganesh's father the late Shri Ganapathy Iyer Natarajan, a noble individual who worked tirelessly to bring about some hope and aspiration through his "Seva Kendra" set up in Tatisilwai, one of the small vilages of Jharkhand.

An innovator with a track record of success in Consultancy, Education and Global Information Technology, Dr Ganesh Natarajan is building a team of committed professionals who will create and implement innovative ideas for Education and Technology development to transform the future for many young Indians.

All the projects NES undertakes are designed to increase the number of young people who possess market-relevant skills and to ensure higher levels of economic productivity through skilled individuals and innovation.

NES seeks to use innovative pedagogy and technology to bring the best global standards of skill development to the world's under-privileged citizens.

Ganesh & HARVARD

A Gold Medalist in Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Dr Ganesh Natarajan has completed his PhD in Knowledge Management at IIT Bombay; Dr Natarajan is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and the Harvard Business School.

Awards and Recognitions

Ganesh was named 'CEO of the Year' by the Asia Pacific HR Conference in 1999 and received the Asia HRD Congress Award for Contributions to the Organisation through HR in 2005. Ganesh was also the finalist at the Ernst & Young 2005 Award where he was recognized for exceptional entrepreneurship.Having been a part of two major success stories in IT Training and Consulting earlier, NIIT and APTECH,Ganesh grew the company's revenues fifty times during his ten year stint as CEO of Aptech and listed it on the Indian and London Stock Exchanges. Ganesh is the National Chair for Confederation of Indian Industries - IT and ITES Committee and a fellow of the Computer Society of India. He also chairs the Higher Education forum of the Confederation of Indian Industries in Western India. He is a memberof the Board of Governors of NITIE Mumbai and member of the Executive Council and Chairmen's Council of NASSCOM.

The Inaugural Ceremony witnessed the thoughts and debates of several luminaries with extensive experience in different walks of life. Prof. Isaac Jacob, Associate Professor, SIMSR delivered the welcome address with a warm welcome to all the delegates and students. Dr. A. K. Sen Gupta, Founder and Convener of HEF, in his address on the reforms and agenda for the future, elaborated on the serious concerns he has arrived at after observing the country's urban and semi-urban areas in details for this cause. He talked for three aspects that heavily impact the growth of the sector today - namely the extent of independence that institutions have, the extent of the quality of the primary and secondary education in the country and the extent of the linkages of higher education with the society and industry. "Much remains to be done in many areas, with everything being regulated right from the fees that can be charged to the curriculum and the qualifications of the faculty to be hired to the incentives offered," he said. He also provided the silver lining, in the form of a circular reported to have been floated by the HRD ministry to the Central Universities allowing them the freedom to hire faculty that they deem fit for a period of three years. He said at least it was a start in the direction of some freedom. He also thanked all the core committee members and volunteers for their tireless work over two months to make the annual seminar possible.

Prof. Indira Parikh, Founder President of FLAME, Pune, in her academic theme talk on inculcating innovation on higher education, delivered a few thoughts as the entity of higher education independent of students and teachers. She beautifully brought out the sentiment of this entity right from its existence to the present day. She spoke of how institutions have emerged and evolved and how learning anchored. "Higher education is standing at a threshold and a cross road at the same time. What is beyond the threshold is something new, and we are not comfortable with it. Unless we cross the threshold and enter the new landscape of education, we will not be able to pick a path at the crossroads," she said, highlighting that the new generation of students is different from its predecessors and will not shy away from looking elsewhere for a meaningful education experience if we are not able to provide it.

One of the wittiest addresses of the day was delivered by Jagdeep Kapoor, CMD, Samsika Marketing Consultants, in his talk on strategic marketing towards branding of higher education institutions. He provided a simple explanation on how human beings consume brands rather than things. He followed it up with the Nine-Brand Shashtra developed by him, the basis of which states that brand equals to trust. Kapoor also provided effective tips towards institutional branding, ending with an important point - to exceed people's expectations.

This was followed by a passionate address by T. V. Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipl Global Education, on the future of higher education. His words were more compelling with the statistics he provided and by the mere virtue of numbers, the audience was awed by what he had to say. He offered that the current number of three crore students in colleges is going to go up to seven crore in a matter of only 15 years, by 2030, when India will have the largest student population in higher education in the world. He emphasised the need to be prepared for it, and provided his insights on the changes required.

Dr. Ramamurthy Natarajan, Former Director, IIT Madras and Former Chairman, AICTE, was eloquent in presenting his research, findings and experiences in the sector, as he delivered the keynote address on the future of regulation in Indian higher education institutes. He negated some of the views and provided the reasons for the necessity of regulation.

The seminar then eased on to its two panel discussions for the afternoon (see below). Towards the end, before the Valedictory Session, the HEF Innovation Awards were presented under different categories to education institutions (see sidebar).

The dynamic Dr. Rajan Saxena, Vice Chancellor, NMIMS University delivered the valedictory address on the future challenges and reforms agenda in higher education in India. He talked of how innovation is the need of the hour, since we are in a highly turbulent education environment from the perspective of politicization of education, even as we stand o the threshold of the new education policy likely to be announced by the government in 2016. He termed autonomy as a Utopian dream, owing to the continuous interventions that crop up from multiple bodies in every sphere of education in our country. Admitting that the government cannot be wished away, he laid out the principles of the kind of autonomy warranted by institutions today, with which they would be able to create varied experiences for the students today. He also touched upon the points of senior citizen education and women empowerment through our institutions.

The seminar concluded with the presidential address by Dr. Ganesh Natarajan, Vice Chairman and CEO, Zensar Technologies. He highlighted his feeling of optimism for Indian higher education and the reasons for it, and provided room for the audience to hope for a brighter future. He laid down the reason for his sense of optimism, which was rooted in the youth force as well as the women workforce of the country. He presented the case for digital literacy (being able to operate a device, any device) so that the population is not left at the mercy of the asymmetry of information. He said that total digital literacy would at least make India a land where nobody would be denied an opportunity for want of access! His concluding remark, made for perfect food for thought for the dispersing audience: "Do not allow any past cynicism to affect the future of this country!"

Growing up 12 km outside Ranchi, I went to a Christian missionary school & the quality of education wasn't great. We were taught not to have ambitions beyond what you are trained for and we were trained to be very good in English. My confidence to communicate with people, my leadership, everything stems from this

1974-79: Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi - This was at the peak of the Jayaprakash Narayan movement and during the first two years we hardly had any classes

1979-1981: NITIE Mumbai - Post-graduation in Industrial Engineering

1999-2005: IIT-Mumbai - PhD on Knowledge Management at Zensar

2006: Harvard Business School - Advanced Management Programme

EXTRA-CURRICULAR:

Used to teach information management at Jamnalal Bajaj, Mumbai while working at DPS at age 27 Authored four business books and four non-business publications

CRISIS MANTRA:

I'm very bad in a crisis, I get very stressed. When there's no crisis, you have to get people to bond so that when there is a crisis and there's stress, there's still an underlying environment of liking each other.

THE LOVE CULTURE:

There are strong bonds among the employees at Zensar and this has come to be known as the love culture.

LIFE LESSONS:

People inherently want to be good, you have to believe in the good in people

ROLE MODELS:

My father, who would work ten hours a day, come home and then head off for some cultural or social commitment; he was an active member of society

KK Nohria:

He was MD, Crompton Greaves and within three months knew my name and where I came from. He would hold workshops where he encouraged people to talk.

WORK EXPERIENCE:

1981-85: Crompton Greaves, Nasik

1981-83: Planning Officer: This was my first job as a management trainee and I was in charge of materials planning

1983-85: Planning and Systems Executive: I got into IT by accident. The company got a computer and I was probably the only one who knew what to do with it and was tasked with building their first production planning system. This got me interested in computer applications

1985-88: DPS, Mumbai: General Manager: This was a joint venture by a data processing company and I grew the start-up from scratch to a Rs 7 cr business when I left. We did software development for companies like Hindustan Lever, Lakme and Voltas.

1988-1991: NIIT

1988-1990: Regional Manager Mumbai: I was hired to build the NIIT brand and presence in Mumbai

1990-1991: Head, Corporate Consulting and Training Division, New Delhi: My wife Uma was heading the Education division for NIIT and between us we managed about 75 per cent of the company's business. Those were fun times

1991-2001: Apple Industries/Aptech, CEO Joined as CEO of Computer Education by Apple Industries Limited: I created the Aptech brand two years later when Apple (the US company) started getting edgy about their brand name. It went from being a Rs 10 crore business with nine centres to over Rs 700 crore with 1000 centers in 40 countries. I learnt everything I know about people management and motivation here. Spent a year on the board of Hexaware (also owned by Atul Nishar of Aptech) and got interested in the software export business.

2001- present: Zensar: Vice-Chairman and CEO: Grown the business from a Rs 40 crore entity to over Rs 2000 crore with a strong HR and people focus.

WORK PHILOSOPHY

Getting things done, being ruthless when it comes to taking decisions but never at the cost of people's emotions & sensitivities.

BIGGEST SUCCESS

It's a cliche, but I want to change the lives of at least ten people each year and I think I've managed to do that over the last 15 years.

LEADERSHIP STYLE

Very emotional & impulsive, it has its negatives and positives. I believe in taking quick decisions & getting things done.

Hiring of private agencies by BPO and IT companies to carry out background checks on their employees in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks has not gone down well with the apex industry body Nasscom.

Calling the move unnecessary, NASSCOM chairman Ganesh Natarajan said the National Skills Registry (NSR) maintained by it could be effectively used for the purpose with sufficient upgrades. DNA had reported on Wednesday that BPO and IT companies, among others, were hiring private detectives and security agencies to verify the antecedents of their employees.

"I don't think employing private groups to carry out background checks is required," Natarajan told DNA. The NSR, though meant for weeding out resumé cheats, is 90% foolproof and can be effectively used for this purpose, he said.

Though set up in December 2005, only 3.5 lakh of the roughly 20 lakh IT professionals have registered on the NSR.

It costs companies Rs 3,000 to get one employee registered on the NSR.

According to R Karthik Shekhar, founder of the Union for ITITES (Unites), said ITITES companies were reluctant to use the NSR. "But I don't see any reason why they should not use it for background checks," he said.

Over the next year, Natarajan said he expected 5-6 lakh new registrations to be added to the NSR, which is managed by NSDL Database Management Ltd (NMDL), a fully owned subsidiary of the National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL).

Asked if it should be made mandatory for every company to register its employees on the NSR, Natarajan said he would go a step ahead and push for compulsory NSR registration for every engineering student. "There is a strong case for every engineering college to register its students on the database, which is very stringent and carries out fingerprint and other checks on people registered," he said.

In spite of a continuing recessionary trend globally, the Indian IT industry is expected to recover in another 12 months. According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), the industry will witness slower growth in the third and fourth quarter of financial year 2008-09.

"The Indian IT industry may have suffered from the recessionary trends but it will recover in another 12 months. Moreover, after 12 months, the Indian IT industry will focus more on domestic market and less on international markets," said Ganesh Natarajan, chairman of NASSCOM and global chief executive officer of Zensar Technologies Limited to reporters during the International Entrepreneurship Forum at Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA).

Brushing aside the recessionary trends as sentimental and not actual, Natarajan said that the IT industry would still grow though at a lesser pace.

"Recession times help the entrepreneurial spirit to flourish unobtrusively. This is not the time for sentimentalism. The future of business beckons to collaborative techniques and networking of enterprises," said Natarajan.

As compared to India, Natarajan said that the UK and other European markets will recover in 2-3 years while the US will take another 12-18 months to emerge from the current gloomy conditions.

Among these countries, Japan is the worst hit since it is a big client of Indian and the US IT industry.

Unlike a growth rate of 24 percent last year, the Indian IT industry will witness a lesser growth rate while the GDP will continue to grow at around six percent, he added.

When asked about lay offs in the industry, Natarajan said that around one lak job commitments have already been made by IT companies in India during campus interviews for 2009.

Also, additional 50,000 people will be recruited during the next year.

In 2008, the industry recruited around two lakh people, said Natarajan.

Success must be measured not just by the number of start-ups that start the journey but also the number that adroitly move from proof of concept to real solutions and from early stage to venture capital funding

THE problem with excessive and premature hype is that the euphoria is often followed by disillusionment.The soaring valuations of copycat e-commerce start-ups in the last three years has been reminiscent of the dotcom spurt at the end of the last century. The dotcom bust, when it happened, was spectacular and in India, the failure of nearly 40% of the early start-ups has left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.So is this the beginning of the end for ‘Start-Up India’? Not at all.On the contrary,it is the end of the beginning and an era of enlightened business models is starting which bodes well for the country and for entrepreneurs!

The start-up movement in the country was given a tremendous boost a year ago with the clarion call given by Prime Minister Modi to “Start-Up India Stand Up India”.The unicorns who reported valuations in excess of a billion dollars were feted and interviewed all over the country with their CEOs becoming instant celebrities. The emergence of incubators all over the country, both within academic institutions and through entrepreneurial initiatives, helped to foster the thought in young minds and even in seasoned executives that it is better to build an exciting new company that creates jobs than to hold on to predictable employment or seek a job in an organisation created by someone else.

However, recent trends have shown that the start-up opportunity is not an automatic vein of gold where everybody can become rich even if the idea they chase is the 60th online laundry service in a city! The dramatic drop in valuations, the dreaded “down rounds” for fresh capital for firms who were the original darlings of investors in the seemingly limitless business-to-consumer (B2C) space and the relative inability of incubators and accelerators to deliver success stories with any consistency has sent tremors through the market and questions are being raised about the sustainability of the entire start-up movement.

The confidence that we will see great success in the next era stems from the opportunities that an economy entering the high growth phase will surely provide.Niche opportunities abound in fintech, healthtech, edtech and,of course,the less traditional areas of Internet of Things (IoT), virtual and augmented reality and machine learning. My own consulting work in the area of digital transformation with some of the major corporations in the country show that chief digital officers are scientifically including start-up solutions in their plans for the future. The participation of central as well as state and local city governments in providing an ecosystem of support will ensure that robust business models can be developed which address a real need in the market-place and support entrepreneurs through all stages of growth.

These stages are best understood by tracing a customer journey, or the way a potential entrepreneur would be assisted through every stage of the arduous journey. The awareness creation process could be done through video and blended learning modules made available through a number of participating engineering, technology and management colleges and even some of the better equipped skills and counselling centres in each city. As part of this process,it would also be worth setting expectations among the wannabe entrepreneurial community and weed out start-ups with me-too ideas that would be doomed to fail without a differentiated value proposition.

Once a worthy cohort of potential entrepreneurs and ideas have been identified through awareness and counselling, formal accelerator programmes offered through a select group of academic institutions and centres would be needed to set the entrepreneur and the potential start-up off on a sound footing. This is the stage at which the formal incubator could come into the selection process,providing start-up capital and space and facilities to take the initial pilots forward and test out the robustness of each idea, product or service before the company has the ability to blossom on its own.

Two important aspects that a city start-up hub must provide is a network of willing corporates to mentor entrepreneurs and open their organisations to test out some of the ideas in a true business environment.And a full funding support system,from angel money to subsequent small rounds of capital all the way to a Series A venture capital round. Success must be measured not just by the number of start-ups that start the journey but also the number that adroitly move from proof of concept to real solutions and early stage to venture capital funding. With all the hype and hoopla that has surrounded the start-up movement in recent times, it is essential for a mature approach to be taken in leading cities to get entrepreneurs on the path to national and global success.

As in the case of the IT sector where seven cities—Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai and Kolkata created over 90% of the multi-billion-dollar export industry,it is likely that the initial wave of hundreds of success stories will emerge from a clutch of cities.We need to watch carefully, avoid the hype and make “Start Up India Stand Up India” a true success story by 2020. Watch this column for some new ideas!

Executive coaching -A panacea for leadership ills

The Business Manager Article, Ganesh Natarajan

A tale of two professionals will serve to illuminate the new coaching opportunity that executive coaching presents to the capability givers and seekers in the Indian corporate sector. The first is Pradipto Mohapatra, celebrity CEO of the nineties who was one of the pioneers of the Music Retail industries in India with his RPG group involvement. RPG will be recalled for being one of the early movers in these sectors. After stepping off RPG's Management Board a few years ago, Pradipto is busier than ever in his new avatar as Chairman of the Coaching Federation of India. Today, CFI works with senior CEOs to train them for a post line management role as coaches and has multiple members of the senior management community in the country as clients of their coaching services.

TIn a different context, look at Sanjay Chaturvedi who runs Action Coach in India. After a successful sales career in Europe and India for Zensar Technologies, Sanjay took the road less travelled and is not only a great coach in his own right but is also building a network of franchises in the country to take coaching to every corner of the county. Are both these cases just beginner's luck or have they struck a vein of gold which will soon run through the entire corporate landscape?

Coaching is not really a new concept for us because if one digs deep enough into our traditions and culture even the "Guru Shishya" process and the learning embedded in the Upanishads indicate a propensity for people to learn from elders with more experience and expertise through processes that are embedded today in the coaching process. As the Human Capital Management practices have evolved from the early days of personnel administration. Many techniques have emerged including 360-degree feedback, action learning supervisor interview peer interview, behaviour modelling appreciative inquiry and shadowing, all of which form a part of the coaching models in vogue today.

From Cooperrider (1995)'s appreciative inquiry model focused on the co-evolutionary search for the best in people and the relevant world around them to the servant leadership model (Russell and Stone, 2002) based on the increasingly popular concept of servant leadership, there have been many approaches for coaching that deals with the individual in the context of teams in the external world. In 2005, Zeus and Skiffington suggested an approach that combines appreciative inquiry, reflective coaching, observational coaching and business practice coaching to address and deliver pre-defined goals. With the plethora of approaches available, there is no wonder that surveys show that a majority of firms have started using coaching to build deeper capabilities in the leadership and next level management hierarchy.

The times are such, with dwindling economic growth, hyper competition and increasing pressure on leaders that capability in one stream is no longer a guarantee for success in a leadership role. The recent case of IT industry doyen NR Narayana Murthy being pulled out of retirement to return to the Executive Chairman's hot seat at Infosys is a clear indicator that coaching can help even the best management teams in times of crisis. Given the contradictions facing the country and the risks and challenges in front of all senior executives today, it certainly seems that coaching is here to stay as a great tool in the HR leader's tool box and there will be many more worthy professionals of the caliber of Pradipto and Sanjay who will adopt best practices to bring coaching to every executive in the years to come!

Executive coaching -A panacea for leadership ills

The Business Manager Article, Ganesh Natarajan

A tale of two professionals will serve to illuminate the new coaching opportunity that executive coaching presents to the capability givers and seekers in the Indian corporate sector. The first is Pradipto Mohapatra, celebrity CEO of the nineties who was one of the pioneers of the Music Retail industries in India with his RPG group involvement. RPG will be recalled for being one of the early movers in these sectors. After stepping off RPG's Management Board a few years ago, Pradipto is busier than ever in his new avatar as Chairman of the Coaching Federation of India. Today, CFI works with senior CEOs to train them for a post line management role as coaches and has multiple members of the senior management community in the country as clients of their coaching services.

TIn a different context, look at Sanjay Chaturvedi who runs Action Coach in India. After a successful sales career in Europe and India for Zensar Technologies, Sanjay took the road less travelled and is not only a great coach in his own right but is also building a network of franchises in the country to take coaching to every corner of the county. Are both these cases just beginner's luck or have they struck a vein of gold which will soon run through the entire corporate landscape?

Coaching is not really a new concept for us because if one digs deep enough into our traditions and culture even the "Guru Shishya" process and the learning embedded in the Upanishads indicate a propensity for people to learn from elders with more experience and expertise through processes that are embedded today in the coaching process. As the Human Capital Management practices have evolved from the early days of personnel administration. Many techniques have emerged including 360-degree feedback, action learning supervisor interview peer interview, behaviour modelling appreciative inquiry and shadowing, all of which form a part of the coaching models in vogue today.

From Cooperrider (1995)'s appreciative inquiry model focused on the co-evolutionary search for the best in people and the relevant world around them to the servant leadership model (Russell and Stone, 2002) based on the increasingly popular concept of servant leadership, there have been many approaches for coaching that deals with the individual in the context of teams in the external world. In 2005, Zeus and Skiffington suggested an approach that combines appreciative inquiry, reflective coaching, observational coaching and business practice coaching to address and deliver pre-defined goals. With the plethora of approaches available, there is no wonder that surveys show that a majority of firms have started using coaching to build deeper capabilities in the leadership and next level management hierarchy.

The times are such, with dwindling economic growth, hyper competition and increasing pressure on leaders that capability in one stream is no longer a guarantee for success in a leadership role. The recent case of IT industry doyen NR Narayana Murthy being pulled out of retirement to return to the Executive Chairman's hot seat at Infosys is a clear indicator that coaching can help even the best management teams in times of crisis. Given the contradictions facing the country and the risks and challenges in front of all senior executives today, it certainly seems that coaching is here to stay as a great tool in the HR leader's tool box and there will be many more worthy professionals of the caliber of Pradipto and Sanjay who will adopt best practices to bring coaching to every executive in the years to come!

A fillip for entrepreneurship

The Financial Express Article, March 2013, Ganesh Natarajan

After all the hype and hoopla that preceded the budget and the weak stock market response to the final presentation made by our valiant Finance Minister, one can only say that one more budget comes and goes, bringing its share of raised expectations, some satisfaction and some disillusionment in its wake. While most industry participants have welcomed the inclusiveness and development orientation this budget brings, there is justifiable concern if the fiscal deficit target will remain an optical illusion with the thirty percent increase in plan expenditure and no discernible evidence that the GDP is getting back to the growth track.

For the IT sector, not much was expected and it is a matter of some relief that the Rangachary committee recommendations were mentioned by the FM and the safe harbor announcements may soon be made ending the uncertainty that always hangs like a Damocles sword over our multi-country industry. With the current account deficit clearly the biggest concern for the industry there seems to have been an opportunity lost to boost exports by providing incentives to operations in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and many more clarifications on taxes and royalties are still awaited. If there is one thing we could not have expected this budget to do, it is providing a panacea for all the ills that plague the economy today. There have been many interesting phrases used to describe the situation the US faces every month, with the eighty-five billion dollar "meat cleaver" cuts problem in Feb and the spectre of another economic shutdown looming in March if the political adversaries continue to merely "kick the can down the road". However the focus on women and the special incentives for technology entrepreneurship are strong positives in this budget.

Entrepreneurship is vital for job creation and job sustenance at any time and specially now when there is overall sluggishness and weak labour reforms that are coming in the way of aggressive job creation in the organized sector. The best opportunity for the Government to create jobs and drive development goals for education, healthcare and financial inclusion is to encourage entrepreneurship. A wonderful case in point is a start-up called NextDrop created in the little town of Hubli in Karnataka by a young Berkeley graduate Anu Sridharan. NextDrop started as a University competition prize winner and began with 375,000 USD from the Knight News Challenge, a competition that "aims to advance the future by funding new ways to digitally inform communities." A classic example of technology applied to a real day to day "aam aadmi" problem, NextDrop uses crowdsourcing and the power of mobile sms to keep consumers aware of water availability in the community. NextDrop plans to cover the entire population of Hubli in 2013 and then offer the service to consumers and utilities in other Indian cities with help from local investors and the Government before scaling worldwide.

NextDrop is just one example of many, of young Indian entrepreneurs from India and overseas creating digitally inspired solutions to serve their home communities better. IT entrepreneurs have the potential to create millions of jobs and find real solutions to many problems that exist in India and abroad. However, IT entrepreneurship and in a larger context, all entrepreneurship needs enabling policies and a vibrant eco-system to spread and grow. The expectations are many and only some of these are directly related to what the Government can do. The current budget through its focus on innovations for rural India and the inclusion of technology incubators under the CSR provision has started to provide this push to technology entrepreneurship and as the year unfolds we need to see a strong focus on start-ups which have the potential to build a new sigmoid of growth, for the IT industry and the country.

A National Entrepreneurship Mission that offers a basket of facilities to new entrepreneurs, from seed capital to incubation to market access and a "Made in India" promotion fund would be some expected Government actions. Other welcome moves would be special incentives to create and support entrepreneurial activities in smaller towns and the launch of special programs in colleges and universities to train young entrepreneurs for successful entry into the world of product creation for traditional businesses as well as new and less explored areas like gaming, mobile internet and electronic commerce.

There continues to be a lot of skepticism about what the Government through tis budget can really do to kick start the economy given its problems with inflation, the deficit and the compulsions to continue the subsidies and hand-outs as the country moves towards the next general election. However one good news that was pointed out to us at a recent industry meeting was that the Government actually managed to reach ninety-three percent of its investment targets in the eleventh five-year plan and there is optimism that if the trillion dollar infrastructure budget in the twelfth plan might actually give the much needed fillip to overall growth in the economy. Pragmatism is the need of the hour and it needs all of us to join the party!

Building an Entrepreneurial Eco-system

The Data Quest Article, March 2013, Ganesh Natarajan

If there is one thing we could not have expected the Finance Minister's budget to do, it is to provide a panacea for all the ills that plague the economy today. His attempt to deliver a budget that does not displease anybody too much while providing the much needed impetus to development and economic inclusion has been reasonably well received by the business community and industry associations but has come in for fire from some think tanks in India and abroad, who believe that the targeted sub five percent fiscal deficit will be well-nigh impossible to achieve with the plan expenditure substantially going up and no signs of revival in the manufacturing sectors of the economy.

One clear signal that the Government has sent out even as it walks the tight rope between the expectations of the vote banks on one hand and the fears of the business community on the other is to provide a string fillip to entrepreneurship in the country. The focus on technology incubators, inclusive innovation start-ups, angel investing and skills development are all steps in the right direction that should boost technology start-ups in the country. The announcement of safe harbor provisions and rationalization of dividend tax from overseas subsidiaries should balance the additional tax most of us will have to pay and one is confident that that few percentage points of additional growth that we expect to see next year will be delivered by the products and services segments of our industry.

Interestingly enough, the major controversy of February for the IT sector was not the NASSCOM growth projections or the budget impact, it was the rather amusing announcement by young and new Yahoo CEO Marissa that she was banning all "work from home" practices. In an industry where work flexibility gas enabled many bright professionals to stay engaged or re-enter the work force, such retrograde steps raise questions about the intent and approach of large firms as they put shareholder priorities ahead of other constituents.

At a panel discussion organized by the National HRD summit in Mumbai recently, an interesting response came from Mukundan, the articulate young CEO of Tata Chemicals in response to a query on dealing with shareholder expectations. Focus on your customer and your employee, he said and shareholder satisfaction will follow. Are some of our bigger IT companies listening? We had a similar discussion at Harvard Business School earlier this year when the case study of Zensar motivating our associates through vision communities and personal excellence initiatives came up. A well-motivated and anchored bunch of talent will do more to improved top and bottom lines than any financial steroid. So let the Finance Minister do his job and do the tough balancing act between industry and people expectations. We should forge ahead and grow our companies by anticipating customer demand and being flexible in our approach to all our stakeholders in times of stress for the Indian and global economies !

New frontiers for Innovation

The Financial Express Article, February 2013, Ganesh Natarajan

A case study presentation and discussion at the Mecca of Management Education the Harvard Business School is always an exciting occasion and when the case being premiered is the Innovation story of Zensar, it makes the excitement truly palpable. Created by Innovation Professor Michael Tushman when he had done a keynote and workshop at NASSCOM's Leadership Forum, this case captures the compulsion, the process and joys of successful innovation, not just at a firm level but for the entire Indian Tech sector.

Innovation in our industry is not new and for over a decade, we have taken the innovation initiative to new heights at NASSCOM, starting with a simple search for innovation in new products and services by small and medium enterprises and then widening the search to process and business model innovation and enlarging the scope to large enterprises as well as multinationals in their work in India. It is to the credit of successive generations of NASSCOM leadership that the enthusiasm for new ideas and new ways of achieving business transformation for our clients has always been at the forefront and it is this unflagging enthusiasm for innovation that has enabled the industry to battle all odds and always emerge triumphant.

The Tushman case itself presents extremely well how one organization that started in the software services business at the worst possible time, the year 2001 after the decline in the Dotcom wave and the Year 2000 opportunity chose a "different point of view" to stand out from the clutter and make itself a valuable partner for even Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 customers. In a market where programming skills were the key differentiator for Indian companies, the service innovation offered was the ability to develop solution blueprints from the study of business processes and create computer systems without the traditional manual programming and testing efforts. The case also recounts how a service innovation morphed into a business model innovation through the ability to deploy people simultaneously in different locations on a common client problem, a true implementation of a global delivery model. And finally how the organization first tends to reject the new idea and then wholeheartedly embraces it as the "holy grail" of differentiation and innovation.

Innovation has been embraced in many firms in the industry, depending upon the scale and scope of the innovation agenda. While many firms have been content to innovate in small doses across the spectrum of products and services, a few have dared to embark on what consulting firm Erehwon calls "Orbit shifting Innovation" and choose the road less traveled in their journey to success. Even amongst Professors at HBS, the approach to fostering innovation have been varied with Christiansen advocating complete spin-outs of breakthrough innovation ideas while the Tushman model of ambidexterity advocates a study of the operating leverage to be derived through simultaneous exploitation and exploration, often keeping an innovative idea within the larger organization to derive its full benefits. And with the new community and open source way of spreading innovation, the Michael Porter research on innovation clusters could point to new models of eco-system development for any set of firms in an industry.

The search for innovation and new ideas to grow and succeed can never go out of vogue in any country or industry. A recent lead article in The Economist pointed out that after the invention of the toilet, there have been few truly breakthrough innovations even in the United States although diehard fans of Apple may find much to disagree with that hypothesis. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the pace of innovation has perceptibly slowed down, even in the West and the onus is on the new economies of India China and parts of Africa and Latin America to pick up the innovation gauntlet and discover new solutions for the world. Information Technology presents new opportunities everyday whether it is the ability for three dimensional printing to bring manufacturing back to the West or even the power of Big Data to transform election outcomes, as the Obama team so effectively demonstrated in the recent US Presidential election. A strong focus on innovation not just in IT but in other industry sectors will enable India to take the lead and bring many new ideas to the forefront for the country's economic benefit.

For the IT industry itself, the better than expected results reported in the third quarter and the robust order books and pipelines enjoyed by most of the top twenty software exporters has enabled industry watchers to breathe a collective sigh of relief. There will be many challenges in 2013 as the US, having thwarted the fiscal cliff now contends with the debt ceiling issue and the European countries continue to struggle for sustainable growth. But the Indian industry has always been innovative in its ability to garner wallet share from its clients and there is no doubt that we are heading for a much better year. Innovation will continue to be the lighthouse that guides the Indian IT ship in these choppy waters!

Zero Dark Thirty - a call to focus!

The Data Quest Article, February 2013, Ganesh Natarajan

Possibly two of the most significant movies released by Hollywood in recent times have been Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty. For entirely different reasons of course - Lincoln depicts the traumas and compulsions of a divided polity in the USA at a time when giving the black community liberty was seen as a precursor to giving them and eventually women the right to vote ! And Zero Dark Thirty traces the sequence of events that led to the detection and elimination of the dreaded Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad Pakistan and provides many ideas worth emulating.

The significance of both movies on our industry should not be lost. While Lincoln has timeless value for an industry which has taken a lead in its Diversity and Inclusion initiatives, the extraordinary focus shown by the protagonist in the Osama movie is probably the need of the hour for the three million plus young people who are building their careers in our industry. Recently I had the opportunity to interact with a bunch of Executive Program participants at Harvard Business School and could not resist the temptation to compare their goals and thinking with a similar group at one of the IIMs a few months ago. While the HBS group were full of fire and the desire to go places in their chosen profession, most of the folks at the IIM were from the IT industry, weary of three or four years of programming and seeking to change their career direction altogether.

The dilemma that young people seem to face after a few years seems to be one of some disillusionment, a recurring feature that our HR leaders need to be aware of. At Zensar we have tried two initiatives to engage these young people in activities beyond their day to day tasks with substantial success. Our Innovation and Vision Community initiatives are both subjects of HBS case studies and at least for us, have shown that it is possible to develop and implement engagement initiatives that enable people at all levels in the firm to come together for common causes. There may not be any burning platforms of the magnitude of Osama elimination, but many smaller goals can be set and pursued with the same zeal that the US Seals displayed in the closing stages of the campaign and unleash new energy through the organization !

At an industry level, it is time for a new focus as well. As the global economies begin to show signs of revival, it is important for all us working with global customers to predict the direction in which their industry sectors will progress and configure domain solutions that address their needs. The rise of new opportunities for the engineering services, gaming and product sectors of the industry also needs sharp focus, from NASSCOM as well as industry strategists. Planned investments in these sunrise areas as well as emerging opportunities in the Business Process Management area can yield rich results in the years to come. Even as the successful IT services industry seeks new sigmoids of growth through Mobility, Cloud and Big Data, new growth curves can be created in adjacent areas if we recognize the opportunities that lie ahead. Zero Dark Thirty time maybe for the Indian industry!

Beyond Davos - a warm spring ahead?

The Data Quest Article, February 2013, Ganesh Natarajan

The World Economic Forum's annual meeting at Davos seems to have decided to take the safe path of reiterating the economic challenges of the day and stayed away from any strong predictions - positive or negative about the immediate future. And even as parts of the US suffer an unprecedented Arctic chill and India comes out of its own winter, there is no telling what this spring is going to hold - for the economy, for the people and indeed for the IT industry!

Some realities that have been underlined at Davos are the fact that the economic recovery in the US and some other parts of the world is still tentative at best and the war over currencies is still to be fought which could have a debilitating effect on many export economies. There is no clarity yet on the recovery of jobs in the West and the resultant impact on immigration policies is still to be seen. All in all, not a very clear canvas on which to paint a growth story for the software exports sector in our country but then success amidst adversity has always been our watchword.

The quarter that has just been concluded has demonstrated for most companies that demand continues to be robust and it can be expected that the industry will enter FY 2014 with good order books and reasonable prospects of middle to high double digit growth. The interesting part of the software exports success story in 2013 is going to be the shift in orbit that most successful companies will see, from vanilla applications management to an interesting mix of applications, infrastructure management and business process management. A decade ago, moving up the value chain and being more domain and consulting led was seen as the Holy Grail for the Indian industry. This is the year when the tryst with that destiny will be truly realised and industry will mature as a true transformation partner to our global customers.

The domestic market too, after many hiccups during the previous year, is showing signs of maturing. Government spending, particularly in mission critical projects like Adhaar is beginning to have an impact and it has to be hoped that with the elections approaching, there will be no slowdown in e-Government project spending. The private sector, emboldened by the stock market rampage and the slow but sure return of the feel good factor in the economy will surely hasten investments in better technology and processes and embrace new mobility cloud and big data solutions. This will open up opportunities for small and medium firms with both products and services capabilities who have been through a mini drought in the uncertain year that 2012 has been for all IT players.

In the new dawn that beckons, there will surely be a substantial revival in opportunities for new job creation, both for technical and general graduates and other skilled persons seeking careers in the IT industry. With the new companies bill putting pressure on increased CSR spends, there is an opportunity to provide skills to a wider cross-section of the population. The IT industry has many opportunities in the year ahead!

An inclusive and development oriented budget

February 2013, Ganesh Natarajan

Sometimes the best budgets are those which do not promise the moon and yet have the potential to correct the wrongs of the past and put the country on a new track of progress and growth. Given the tight rope walk that the FM had to do between populist demands in an election season and the growth needs for the business and investor community, this budget is a step in the right direction.

The strongest feature of the budget has been its focus on education and skills and the development of an entrepreneurship climate in the country. The imperative to invest in the skilling of 50 million of our countrymen has resulted in string additional outlays for Education and skills and relief from service tax for vocational education providers. This coupled with the admissibility of contributions to University Technology Incubators as CSR, the support by the National Innovation funds to entrepreneurship ideas focused on inclusive India and the "pass through" support provided to angel investors by SEBI can all enable a new wave of tech entrepreneurs to succeed in the country.

For the IT sector, much has been expected to ensure that India's leadership position in global sourcing is retained. With global economies continuing to be slow and competitors like China, Philippines, Latin America and Eastern Europe nipping at the heels of all software exporters, clear continuation of the SEZ benefits and providing incentives for Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and product entrepreneurs would help in accelerating exports. The budget has been silent on this although benefits were announced for insurance companies investing in smaller locations. The second expectation was the Government would announce confidence building measures to ensure that customers continue to give India the lion's share of their offshore allocations whether it is through their own Global In-House Centres or enhanced work with third party solution providers from this country. Transfer pricing clarifications and the implementation of the Safe Harbour provisions enacted in 2009 would ensure that both the Indian industry and multi-nationals operating in India grow their operations in this country! Deliberations have already begun in the Rangachary committee on this topic and the FM's promise that this would be completed and Safe Harbour completed in this year is some encouragement for the industry.

There are some other minor advantages from the budget as well including the tax on dividends from subsidiaries and the special encouragement provided to women through various initiatives. Overall the budget does not move the needle much for the IT sector or for that matter for any other industry segment in the country, but if a clear path to fiscal consolidation emerges and the various departments of the Government show the will to implement on time and put in the necessary Governance mechanisms, we can all be relieved that the Finance Minister has put us on the path to renewed confidence and a return to higher growth numbers! During the coming months it is hoped that the focus on reducing the Current Account Deficit will result in further boosts for the exports sector.

The industry looks forward to more e-Government initiatives and the development of a collaborative eco-system between Government, Associations, Financing institutions, Universities and companies to set the Software industry on a high growth track in the years to come.

Nothing to cheer about but a lot of promise!

February 2013, Ganesh Natarajan

The interesting feature of this year's budget was the lack of hype and hoopla that preceded it. The Railway budget earlier in the week and the rather grim economic survey had foretold that there was no chance of some miracle being pulled out of the hat. And there wasn't! This is a budget that did little to benefit most sections of the industry, but then it didn't harm anyone much either!

If there is one thing we could not have expected this budget or any budget to do, it is to provide a panacea for all the ills that plague the economy today. However in an environment where the widening fiscal and current account deficit is causing genuine fears of a downgrade, one clear signal that the investor community expected from the Government even as it walks the tight rope between the expectations of the vote banks on one hand and the fears of the business community on the other has been that there will be a path of prudence followed not just this year but for some time to come. This has been done in the budget and for that we should be thankful.

For the IT sector, there were three expectations, from the budget and beyond. With global economies continuing to be slow and competitors like China, Philippines, Latin America and Eastern Europe nipping at the heels of all software exporters, clear continuation of the SEZ benefits and providing incentives for Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and product entrepreneurs would help in accelerating exports. The budget has been silent on this and we hope that future policy announcements will ensure this happens and provides a fillip to new entrepreneurs and new destinations.

The second expectation was the Government would announce confidence building measures to ensure that customers continue to give India the lion's share of their offshore allocations whether it is through their own Global In-House Centres or enhanced work with third party solution providers from this country. Transfer pricing clarifications and the implementation of the Safe Harbour provisions enacted in 2009 would ensure that both the Indian industry and multi-nationals operating in India grow their operations in this country! Deliberations have already begun in the Rangachary committee on this topic and the FM's promise that this would be completed and Safe Harbour completed in this year is some encouragement for the industry.

The third and possible the most future focused announcement expected was a boost for young entrepreneurs not just in IT but in every sector of the economy. Entrepreneurship is vital for job creation and job sustenance at any time and specially now when there is overall sluggishness and weak labour reforms that are coming in the way of aggressive job creation in the organized sector. Entrepreneurship needs enabling policies and a vibrant eco-system to spread and grow. This budget has done a lot in this area from the admissibility of contributions to University Technology Incubators as CSR to the support by the National Innovation funds to entrepreneurship ideas focused on inclusive India to the "pass through" support provided to angel investors by SEBI. Add to this the additional outlays and incentives provided for skills and education and, it can be hoped that this will create an environment for strong entrepreneurship in the country.

"The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic." — Peter Drucker

These words have been heeded by the FM in his new budget. Overall the budget does not move the needle much, but at least there seems to be a new resolve to right the wrongs of the past and take the country forward. At a time when a new path forward was necessary, the FM seems resolved to find it. It will now have to be seen whether the implementation and governance mechanisms will be put in place to deliver on the numbers that the budget promises!

IT industry is at crossroads

The Financial Express Article, February 2013, Ganesh Natarajan

An oft repeated refrain from other industry players about the IT sector is that the sector has been the blue-eyed boy of the government for many years and now there is no need to do anything for the IT guys—let them fend for themselves! And as a new set of budget announcements is just around the corner, it may be a good time to assess how government policy has facilitated the growth of our industry to its hundred billion dollar level and what more needs to be done now.

There is no doubt that the visionary Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) scheme formulated by the erstwhile department of electronics provided the initial fillip to the industry and encouraged early investors to chase the pot of gold at the end of the software exports rainbow—a pot that many enterprising entrepreneurs did find and continue to fill even today! There are also many excellent initiatives the industry can thank successive IT ministers and the bureaucrats in the ministry of IT for—the IT SEZs, the collaborations to create the Data Security Council of India and the National Institute of Smart Governance and the mission mode e-government projects announced with much fanfare and slowly seeing implementation.

However all this has not just resulted in success for the industry but also provided substantial collateral benefits for the country. Over ten million direct and indirect employment opportunities created, enhanced balance of payments position through exports earnings and foreign exchange repatriations and the ability to say that at least in one industry segment, India is the undisputed number one are just three of the many advantages that a robust software exports sector has given India. Surely a case of symbiotic government-industry relationships that have helped the country a great deal!

The industry is today at a cross-road and will need among other things, some visionary government policy support to continue its leadership and widen the gap with competitors. Today we have competitors like the Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico and of course China nipping at our heels, all aided by government incentives and subsidies for the sector. The IT services industry has matured and is proudly paying its share of taxes all over the world and through initiatives like Nasscom Foundation and company specific CSR and employability initiatives, doing more than its share to work for the cause of national progress. So what do we expect from the Budget? Nothing much, just an effort to pave the way for faster growth and initiatives to help some of the newer entrants to the industry to join the success story!

On the policy front, extension of the good work already initiated by the Rangachar committee with clear interpretations of transfer pricing and safe harbor clauses would be welcome. Continuation of the SEZ schemes to enable large investment decisions to be made and enabling large scale training and manpower development expenses to get tax relief would ensure that the industry growth path is smooth.

To meet the growth and development goals for the country special schemes need to be announced for Tier 3 cities to enable industry to create employment in these locations and special incentives for new entrepreneurs, particularly in high potential segments like software products, embedded systems, engineering services and gaming. A government-industry joint mission on entrepreneurship supported by state governments like MP, Bihar, Rajasthan and many others who would like to claim their place in the IT sun would be welcome. New entrants to the industry would also be motivated by opening up more domestic spending, easing the compliance burden and elimination of dual levies like VAT and service tax that tend to make product development uncompetitive.

A strong movement towards intellectual property creation and promotion for the country would be an initiative that needs to be started this year but would probably need a longer runway than the coming fiscal year. The government and industry, supported by well-meaning entities like Nasscom and the National IT and Knowledge Committees of the CII need to partner to demonstrate that the future course of the industry will be built on solutions rather than just services and IPR sensitivity should be established through extensive training and incentives for creation like the very noble Multiplier Grants Scheme that facilitated industry academia partnerships for the creation of new products. Most important, the government can allocate significant budgets for promotion of the "Made in India" brand and enable thousands of young companies to reach the next level of stability by providing customer opportunities in and outside the country for their products.

A special closing word for the software product fraternity. Companies like Tally have made us proud by holding their own in a market cluttered with multinational product offerings and successful start-ups like Zoho have shown there is value in the India product initiative. The outstanding product conferences held every year in Bengaluru show that there is no lack of enthusiasm. The industry needs to close ranks and work to make this a ten billion dollar segment in the very near future!

The exciting world of Retail E-Commerce

The interesting feature of digital transformation is that unlike other technology adoptions that happen first in the corporate sector and then affect the work and life patterns of individuals, it is very different in the evolving world of retail. Here it is the early adoption of mobility and social media by the new generation of smart phone and computer users and the reluctance to go to brick outlets when one can simply click through to a purchase transaction that has created the revolution of E-Commerce and M-Commerce in the retail sector.

The surge in digital transformation with the adoption of pay-per-use software as a service in preference to CAPEX investments in Information Technology and the disappearance of "heavy iron" data centres into the infrastructure as a service model has been evident in the last couple of years worldwide. The rapid rise of start-up solutions in mobility and social media adoption by the corporate sector, supported by the development of trends and patterns trough big data analytics has also pushed retailers and many early movers in other sectors like manufacturing, banking and insurance to move their store-fronts to the internet. Globally this trend was highlighted by the fact that the famous Black Friday shopping surge that happens after Thanksgiving in the US has been eclipsed by the "Manic Monday" e-Commerce transactions. There is a growing conviction among global retailers that standard stores will soon evolve into round the year event venues for fashion shows and cooking contests, while most commerce happened from the comfort of an armchair at home.

Recent forecasts by Gartner and other analyst firms bear out this hypothesis. The e-commerce software market, which touched three billion US dollars in sales in 2012, is expected to grow at nearly fourteen percent CAGR in the next three years and over fifty percent of organisations which derive more than ten percent of their business online are expected to embrace e-commerce as a transformational initiative. This makes business analytics, e-commerce and customer experience the top three priorities for management teams for five-year technology investments.

The imperatives for a successful e-commerce foray are predictable but still important to emphasise. Discerning customers will demand a seamless multichannel user experience as they move from physical visits to the store to online browsing and purchasing through a range of devices. For the retailer or any firm which has e-Commerce as part of its strategy, the choice of technology is a non-trivial decision, since this will impact the future revenues of the brand. A recent study shows that Oracle's ATG Commerce is the top choice, already bought by twenty-five of the top hundred retailers, followed closely by IBM WebSphere which boasts twenty percent share of the same market. It is also estimated that over thirty percent of the top ten thousand e-commerce sites globally and nearly forty percent of the top thousand run on Oracle Commerce. With SAP and other lesser known boutiques jostling for opportunity share, the technology wars can expect to be very hard fought in the years to come.

A case in point is a significant US retailer which embraced Oracle's ATG Commerce last year and saw quarterly on-line sales jump nearly thirty percent. They deployed a combination of advanced search capabilities and mobile-friendly interactions, further enhanced with the implementation of a data management and business intelligence solution, Endeca to create a perfect online shopping experience for consumers. The power of these technologies enables segmentation of customers based on their browsing and shopping behavior and investments in "ship-from-store" and in-store pickups for orders placed online, increasing the satisfaction levels for customers.

The online shopping movement has still to take off fully in India, contributing less than five percent to the four hundred and twenty billion dollar overall retail market last year. However the funding moves demonstrate the interest of global investors and the ability to access the billion plus consumers in all parts of the country shows that a revolution is waiting to happen in our country as well. Recent news reports of Flipkart raising a billion dollars in predominantly foreign capital, followed closely by global giant Amazon's announcement of an additional two billion dollars investment in growing its India business. If the ban on foreign investment in on-line retailing is relaxed, the floodgates will truly open for retail e-Commerce.

It is important to note too that while E and M Commerce was once perceived as a development of importance only in Retail, customers of organisations in the manufacturing, insurance, banking and healthcare industries are also expecting similar web convenience. Organisations worldwide have begun to realise that disintermediation is the order of the day and interesting online investments could rapidly accelerate the direct interaction with and sale of products and services to their target segment.

For the IT Services industry in India, this means a rapid escalation of opportunities to move towards true solutions and create new channels of revenue generations for clients. New skills will be needed too because commerce sites are as much about aesthetics and usability as they are about technology and web development capabilities. For companies which are enabling E and M Commerce Transformation, the opportunities are huge !

Digital India - challenge and opportunity

The budget led by FM Arun Jaitley mentioned it and PM Modi's Independence Day speech articulated it loud and clear - Digital India is an agenda that differentiates this Government from its predecessor, which failed to deliver the National Optical Fibre Network to every part of India and left many of India's 600,000 villages and 250,000 Panchayats wanting in terms of broadband connectivity.

If this Government takes the agenda forward and does not leave any of the constituent parts gasping for funds, the opportunities are huge for the country in general and for willing participants in the IT sector as well! There is much to be done, from the creation of smart cities to the comprehensive availability of broadband, from connectivity in education, healthcare, agriculture and manufacturing to a National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM) that NASSCOM Foundation has already taken up with the Department of Electronics & IT (DEITy). What is important to understand is that like any elephant, Digital India has many parts and each has to be addressed to make the big vision a reality.

Prime Minister Modi in his inimitable style touched all the right chords in his speech, which included in its ambit the opportunities for access to better healthcare , education and information for better livelihood that is at the core of the digital opportunity. A lot will be expected from the National Broadband Mission to lay the digital infrastructure on which many of these national applications can be mounted. In the last couple of years, NASSCOM Foundation with its "Follow the Fibre" approach and the active partnership of technology majors Intel Google and Microsoft has shown that village wide digital literacy is possible with successful outcomes in three villages in different parts of the country and more on the way!

There are two key enablers that make the Digital Literacy Mission an achievable one. The Common Service Centres (CSCs) set up in over 100,000 locations by the Government may have reported only partial success, but enriching them with a curriculum and methodology to give every interested citizen the skills to access and disseminate information can be the first building block. With the planned doubling of the CSCs and the opportunity to layer on skills programs in a host of sectors where qualification packs are already being created in the framework outlined by the NSDC, the same digital infrastructure can also be used to impart job skills.

The second enabler is the availability of a few hundred crores from the CSR funds that will be made available as companies scramble to meet the "2% of profits" guideline embedded in the new Companies Act. Participating in a collaborative mission in both urban and rural parts of India and setting up independent NDLM Centres or enabling schools, libraries, post offices, CSCs or village panchayats to be digitally enabled is a charter that all IT companies would be well served in taking up as part of their CSR portfolio. With companies like Cognizant, Cyient, Zensar and others already lining up to contribute and NASSCOM Foundation playing the lead, there is a lot we can do to make Digital India happen!

Skilling India - Technology can make it happen!

When one talks of a fully skilled India, the enormity of the challenge of getting job ready skills to a population of the size of our vast country can be daunting at first sight. However, a concerted effort to build on the many yeoman efforts made in the past and utilise the institutions that exist on the ground can show the way and appropriate use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) will enable shrinkage of time and space distances and make the challenge feasible!

There are three existing enablers that need to be effectively used in addressing this challenge. The first is the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) which has addressed the task of skill building in a very scientific manner, setting up Sector Skills Councils to define job roles and qualifications packs for a large number of employable areas and identifying training and assessment partners to ensure quality and reliability in the process. The second is the large number of Common Service Centres (CSCs) that have been put on the ground in all parts of the country, which are intended to play roles beyond facilitating Government to Citizen services and are already, in some states proving to be an effective way of accessing information and availing simple services. The plan to cover all of India's 600,000 villages and 250,000 plus Panchayats in the next CSC expansion and the National Broadband Mission to make connectivity available to all Panchayats will create the backbone of fibre that can be judiciously used for any large program that is now envisaged.

The third and probably the most potential multiplier force is the availability of tens of thousands of crores of deployable corporate funds that will be released under the newly promulgated two percent of profits to be deployed in CSR. While consultants and internal strategy planners are weighing options to spend these funds for maximum real and some corporate benefit, the solution lies in the speech made by Prime Minister Modi to the IT industry, when he was still "Candidate Modi". He had suggested a massive collaborative effort to keep children in school and pave the way for a skills revolution in the country. The National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM) is the industry's response to this.

In its most elementary form, the NDLM will target to impart basic capabilities in lakhs and then millions of crores of Indians to access data and information that enables better work and life and disseminate the information and knowledge so gathered to the most active user in the shortest possible time. Digital Literacy is not to be confused with IT literacy because it will touch the life of farmers, fishermen and every other citizen in the country. The power of the mission lies in its simplicity, because every computer or smart phone can be enabled to provide this training, from corporate sponsored NDLM centres to municipal and private schools where computers and smart classrooms are already deployed, to public post office and libraries. The CSC network, enabled by a common program, methodology and curriculum and the active participation of industry and civil society, should be the right vehicle to accelerate the digital literacy movement. The allocation of funds for the first phase of the project is an encouraging precursor to the larger Public-Private Partnership that can and should emerge. The vision of digital literacy that one member of every Indian family, a target of two hundred million plus citizens, should be armed with access and dissemination skills in the next few years is massive but attainable.

Digital Literacy in the medium term should prove to be a means and not an end in itself. With the National Occupational Standards falling into place and the Vocational Education Framework providing credence to Vocational skills as a pre-requisite for jobs as well as providing entry paths to formal education and degrees, a massive skills movement can be layered on top of NDLM, attracting and enabling tens of millions of digitally literate Indians to be assessed for aptitude and trained in the NDLM centers and other special purpose skill building institutions to acquire and be certified for job roles in Manufacturing, Retail, Healthcare, Financial Services, Telecom , IT and many other areas.

Skill building campaigns in the past have not met with the success they needed because it could not be placed in the context of employment generation on a mass scale, Today, with the expectations of India having been raised to unprecedented levels and many plans afoot by Government and Private sector to invest in infrastructure, manufacturing , agriculture and services, the National Digital Literacy Mission, if embraced, adopted and implemented by all States, industry associations and all corporations as a cause worthy of support can set in motion a series of initiatives and events that will truly set this country on the path to sustainable double digit GDP growth !

Balancing the budget -- the Jaitley way

All credit to the finance minister for walking the fiscal and expectation tightrope extremely well in his budget speech, says Ganesh Natarajan.

A few days ago, if you asked any thinking individual what was expected from the finance minister beyond all the hype and hoopla of expectations, three elements would be sure to figure -- a concerted skills and job creation effort, strong focus on infrastructure and rationalisation of taxes. To a large extent Finance Minister Jaitley has indeed delivered on all three.

On the skills front, the biggest concern in recent times has been the distribution of the skills effort across multiple ministries. The specific mention of centralising all these efforts under the newly minted skills and entrepreneurship ministry and the focus on a National Skills Mission will help clear some of the cobwebs. Further, the announcement of the Self Employment and Talent Utilisation initiative and the initial outlay of Rs 1000 crores should help to create young job-givers across the country.

Infrastructure has been given the biggest gainer of the budget along with education and healthcare and with a resolve to address the public-private partnership snafus that ailed investments on the ground in the past. And the tremendous progress that has been made in tax rationalisation for foreign investors and the postponement or GAAR and making it prospective rather than retrospective will surely gladden the hearts of the investor community.

All credit to the finance minister for walking the fiscal and expectation tightrope extremely well in his budget speech. While the corporate sector should be happy, with the exception of the increase in excise, service taxes and corporate taxes, the focus on the poorer sections of the country is creditable.

The universal social security system and the availability of affordable insurance and special facilities for women, the elderly and the differently abled will all enable a wider redistribution of the budget largesse.

However, there are still some areas that have not got the attention they deserve. Digital India is one of these. Apart from a commitment to the national optical fibre network and its implementation in Andhra Pradesh and Telengana and eventually in the east and north-east, there is an opportunity missed to massively fund the National Broadband Mission, the National Digital Literacy Mission and downstream initiatives like IT enabled manufacturing and smart cities to create the base for a country wide digital environment.

The mitigating factors are the Janadhan Aadhar Mobile initiative and the Electronic Trade Receivable Exchange and the e-business portal, which are all digital initiatives in the right direction and the large outlays for education, healthcare and defence will create opportunities for further digitalisation.

And of course the continuing focus on the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation will provide opportunities for expanding data centres across the country to support the large ‘Make in India' centres of excellence.

The IT industry itself, in spite of the generous mention of its global prowess by the finance minister, will see the Budget as mixed bag. There were three major expectations -- rationalisation of the tax on SEZs and the elimination or at least reduction of the minimum alternate tax, easing out the multiple knots in e-procurement by the government, and a comprehensive welcoming and enabling environment for global IT majors and start-ups to ensure that India emerged as the preferred destination for all IT investments.

The promise of easing out e-procurement by the government and the commencement of the Self-Employment and Talent Utilisation initiative with an initial allocation for the start-up community are all good steps in the right direction.

However, the much awaited elimination or reduction of MAT on SEZs has not happened and while foreign funds have found some much-needed relief, the financial environment remains sub-optimal for angel investors and domestic VCs.

On the vision side, there is much to be appreciated. We will all be proud to be part of the fastest growing economy in the world if 8.5 per cent growth is registered in the coming fiscal, and the plan to attain double digit growth is inspiring.

The 2022 India@75 vision with every Indian having a roof over the head and a clean and education oriented environment with jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities available for all is something every Indian should be happy about, irrespective of social or economic strata.

And if there is a balanced approach and focus on all the sectors -- manufacturing, services and agriculture -- and a concerted attempt to create the physical, digital and social infrastructure in every part of the country that could attract and retain the best of domestic and global talent and management, we can truly see the country of our dreams emerge in eight years.

And we can then look back and say -- Jaitley's 2015 budget was the beginning!

IT in FY 16 - New needs, new opportunities !

This article is being written at a time when much is expected from the 2015 Union Budget and will be read after the Finance Minister would have made his budget recommendations. For the IT industry in India, basking in the success of a decent double digit growth year, with one more expected to follow, one can safely assume that some good would have been done in the budget but our aspirations for policies and programs from the Government that will pave the way for order of magnitude growth will still be a "work-in-progress".

To take stock of where the industry has reached and where it wants to go, an analysis of the numbers the National Association of Software & Services Companies (NASSCOM) announced in February can set up the base. The industry at the end of fiscal 2015 would have the largest share in total services exports from India - 38%, become the largest magnet for Private Equity and Venture Capital investments in technology and e-commerce - over six billion dollars and established dominant share for India in the global sourcing stakes - 55 %. Industry revenues excluding e-commerce transactions are expected to be around 132 billion USD, with exports nearing a hundred billion dollars. With IT Services, Business Process Management and Engineering R&D all registering double digit growth and both exports and domestic segments showing promise, the next year which is projected to track growth rates of between 12 -14% can continue the growth story. If the Government comes to the party, this can be definitely sustained and indeed accelerated in the years to come, with huge impact on skilling, job creation and entrepreneurship!

NASSCOM in the budget recommendations made to the Government had clearly articulated the need for an eco-system of innovation in the country, enabling young technology entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises in the hardware and software side of the industry to become a powerful complement to the large established players in IT and Business Process Services. The factors that have hindered the younger entrants and even driven some to move to Silicon Valley or Singapore can be summarised in three buckets.

The first imperative is a nurturing environment for start-ups and small firms where access to angel and venture capital is as easy as in competing countries. Incentives for product companies and Tier 3 and4 locations are needed to ensure that industry growth is broadbased and entrepreneurs come up all over the country. Ease of e-procurement and facilitation of participation of smaller firms in large Government initiatives would be essential to fostering the growth of the sector. And finally, the fastest growing segment of the start-up eco-system - the Internet and e-Commerce sector, needs to be encouraged through rationalization of taxation on digital transactions and facilitation of adoption of technology enabled platforms.

NASSCOM and the industry players have been doing their bit to spur start-up and product innovation. The Ten K start-up program has been a great success with over three thousand start-ups and eight hundred more every year, having accessed over two billion dollars of capital from five hundred angel investors and seventy VC/PE firms since 2010. The exciting aspect has been the spread of focus areas of these start-us, ranging from Internet of Things to HealthTech to Augmented Reality in addition to the more traditional Social Media Mobility, Cloud and Big Data & Analytics. The creation of over eighty incubators and more and more academic institutions adopting new skills oriented programs to bring just in time talent to the industry has also provide the much needed boost to expansion of the industry into new areas.

The large enterprises in this industry, whether Indian, multinational or global in-house centres of large corporations abroad have needs too, which have to be met if the target of a three hundred billion dollar industry in 2020 has to be realised. Regulatory and tax challenges, particularly stability of taxation policies have to be addressed to avoid flight of large firms to more predictable locales abroad.

Finally the flagships programs of the Modi Government - Make in India, Digital India and the National Digital Literacy Mission, all have tremendous scope for IT industry participation on a large scale, which will enhance industry prospects and also accelerate the attainment of the lofty goals set for these missions. As a case in point, the participation of millions of SMEs in the Make in India movement can only happen if information services are available on tap, on a Pay per Use basis from public data centres. This calls for a significant PPP investment, where hosting services, cloud based software as a service solutions and large scale connectivity through the National Optical Fibre Network reaches the last mile of the country. Similarly Digital India will happen only if every gram panchayat and village in the country is touched by a better connectivity and access environment for Citizen to Government interfaces as well as general information access and dissemination that can make life and work truly transparent and simple.

This is a Government that has shown, through policy and action that it means business. Many of us who have built the IT industry to a stature that every Indian can be proud of, believe and hope that with robust partnerships with Government and academic institutions, the best is yet to come - for the country and for our industry!

The Value of an Open Mind

Today the world is changing at an even faster pace and to be successful, do keep that mind open, let all kinds of new ideas and inspiration flood in and be the best leader you can learn to be !

There is an old cliché that two things work best if they are open – an open parachute and an open mind! And for people leading teams and companies in the corporate sector, keeping an open mind is probably one of the best pieces of advice they can get. And, they need to take it for sure!

As one goes through a career, there will always be unique experiences and new inputs that will confront us, and how we tackle, absorb and assimilate these experiences often determine how effectively we learn and the success we will attain in our careers . In my own career, I have been through successive experiences that taught me more than reading a million management text books would ever have.

My most profound learning has been the ways to relate to colleagues at work. When I took up my first job in the eighties in Crompton Greaves’ Switchgear manufacturing factory in Nasik, I had come into the industry after living in fairy traditional middle-class environments where respecting elders and others, was very much part of the growing up process. The early experience in the manufacturing unit was no different, respect given to very senior visitors from the Mumbai corporate office often bordering on the obsequious!

Moving to run my own entity in Mumbai, I transported the only culture I knew into the new firm in spite of having the privilege of working with very young colleagues who would have been glad to be treated as friends rather than subordinates. But the real eye-opener for me came when I joined the very high energy and strong relationship oriented computer consulting and training firm NIIT in the late eighties. Creating by professionals with a large cohort of IIM and other MBAs in the mix, the atmosphere of total camaraderie and informality first came as a cultural shock but within the short time span of three years, became a preferred mode of relating to colleagues and everyone up and down the corporate hierarchy.

In 1991, when I got headhunted at the age of thirty-four to become the CEO of APTECH, an environment of informality and friendliness was the culture I could transport from Delhi to Mumbai and in spite of having a direct subordinate group in their late forties and early fifties, I found it extremely easy to relate to the twenty-year olds who formed the marketing and technical base of the company. This air of bonhomie and the creation of span busting vision communities led to our incredible success in the next nine years of very high retention and motivation levels and incredible success in racing the top of the computer training industry in India and many global destinations.

The ability to keep an open mind and adapt my management and leadership style has continued to be one attribute that has taken Zensar from its early beginnings in 2001 to become a eight thousand people strong firm touching half a billion dollars in revenue and a track record of growth and low employee attrition that is the envy of the industry. I have seen in most of my colleagues across fourteen nationalities, the willingness to realise that generations now change every five years or so and there is much more we can learn from young colleagues than by relying on traditional styles of management. Today, the world is changing at an even faster pace and to be successful, do keep that mind open, let all kinds of new ideas and inspiration flood in and be the best leader you can learn to be!

THE LAST WORD : Going that extra mile

It should be incumbent on every parent to show the way to children and youth to participate in the development of a society of equal opportunity where camaraderie abounds and wealth is distributed to all

Meet Ruth Tribhuvan, a member of the Pune City Connect, which is working day and night with the Pune Municipal Corporation to make a Swachh, Suvidya, Skilled and Digital Pune happen in record time, Ruth embodies the urgency of youth and her never say never attitude has enabled her to move mountains in the last few months. From enabling the creation of a vehicle that can receive CSR funds from leading Pune corporates to getting tax exemptions from the authorities to being a critical cog in the wheel that made the Prime Minister’s visit to the city a grand success, Ruth is one Punekar who has the grit and determination to give her all for her beloved city.

Meet Shishir Vaidya. From corporate executive to being a mentor to startups, he has shown the vibrancy and flexibility of approach to succeed in multiple roles. Today he has a new passion— to build a community for young expectant mothers that will enable them to have their queries and concerns addressed and even connect them to 50 and more of the best gynecologists in the city so that their wellbeing is assured during pregnancy and through maternity.

Finally, meet Shumita Mahajan, dancer turned journalist and now turned leader of one of the most significant partnerships between the corporate sector and civil society—Social Venture Partners (SVP).

SVP today has moved from being a small offshoot of the global Social Venture Partners International to the enabler of significant NGOs and social enterprises in the city, providing capacity building, funds and mentoring to some worthy livelihood creators for local youth and SVP India has embarked on a worthy mission to enable a million livelihoods in the next few years.

What is common between Shumita, Shishir and Ruth is their sense of purpose, the drive to succeed against all odds and the willingness to go the extra mile to ensure their goals for the community and the city are realised. When Ruth decided that the city needed a more streamlined approach to Swachh, she took it upon herself to work with the Corporation on a formal policy for public toilets and has moved mountains to ensure that corporate support flows for the building of these toilets in the city. And in Shumita’s case, it is her willingness to reach out and be at ease with business movers and shakers on the one hand and very worthy social entrepreneurs like Jaya Kale of Jagruti Foundation on the other that gives her the credibility to chart new paths for SVP Pune. The fact that SVP today catalyses many new movements in the city, not least of which is the ambitious Lighthouses of Pune programme underscores the power of commitment to purpose.

There are enough initiatives in our city too, including the ‘Keep Walking’ and ‘Seva Sahyog’ movements that enable collaborative work to be done oriented towards good causes

What is that differentiates these three and many more of the young people who are choosing the road less travelled and working for social and entrepreneurial causes from their brethren who settle into cushy corporate roles? The ‘sense of agency’ or inner drive to do great deeds is very strong and the prime motivation comes not from the urge to make more and more money which is the bane of modern civilisation but the need to make a difference to the lives of ordinary people. And if there is one characteristic that makes people in Pune stand out, it is the large numbers of Ruths, Shumitas and Shishirs who lead the way to a better city and also a better country.

What can one do to imbue this sense of purpose and social consciousness in young members of our society? One is tempted to suggest that all television watching should be discouraged since all that seems to do is spread a sense of negativism in the community, whether through the unseemly fracas between a do-gooder politician and the head of one of our best financial institutions that is resulting in an early departure of the latter or the unseemly fracas between politicians that is a daily feature of television dramas. But since such wishes may not easily be granted, an alternative would be to enable young people to contribute at an early age to social work in the city.

When I was growing up in the village of Tatisilwai near Ranchi in the sixties, I had the privilege of having a father who spent as much time on social initiatives as he did on his entrepreneurial chemical venture and it was not unusual for us to go straight from school to his “Seva Kendra” where the children of the village would cluster to drink milk, play together and sing patriotic songs. Participating in this would often be more fulfilling that watching a movie in the city and we would rarely miss this. There are enough initiatives in our city too, including the ‘Keep Walking’ and ‘Seva Sahyog’ movements that enable collaborative work to be done oriented towards good causes. It should be incumbent on every parent to show the way to children and youth to participate in such initiatives and in the development of a society of equal opportunity where camaraderie abounds and wealth is distributed to all! In this will lie the road to true happiness—for the community, the city and the country!

Forgotten Virtue of Gratitude

THE LAST WORD : IT companies have to do a T20

The similarities between T20 cricket and IT firms don't end here. As we all know, the course of an IPL game is predictable in its unpredictability. IT companies are no different

We are in the middle of one more exciting IPL season, which always starts with low viewership but builds up excitement as the games progress and likely winners manage to emerge. The IT Services industry follows pretty much the same course during each quarter with the excitement peaking after the first company, typically Infosys and TCS announcing its financial numbers and then moving back to "business as usual" as the top three and the next ten report their numbers and get back to business.

The similarities between T20 cricket and IT firms don't end here. As we all know, the course of an IPL game is predictable in its unpredictability. When the team batting first manages to reach fifty for the loss of two wickets in six overs or less, the supporters sense victory only to fall into a slough of despond when the star batsman gets out. Finally what happens in the game is any body's guess and the truth for India has always been that when a Kohli is batting with Dhoni still to come, the hope of victory surges constantly in our minds.

IT companies are no different. Having come off the leadership role in Zensar recently after a wonderful ride of 15 years and more, I find it amusing to think of the number of times a big deal or success in a growth area like Digital Commerce has kept industry watchers happy even when the numbers were somewhat weak in traditional areas. Today every company is talking up their "Digital Transformation" story with the full realisation that this area of our work is the 'Virat Kohli' of our team portfolio and if that continues to fire, the target of consistent ten percent annual organic growth in our revenues is very achievable.

Today every company is talking up their "Digital Transformation" story with the full realisation that this area of our work is the 'Virat Kohli' of our team portfolio and if that continues to fire, the target of consistent 10 percent annual organic growth in our revenues is very achievable

One reason why one can expect this heavy hitter called Digital Transformation to enable a turnaround in industry fortunes next year and set is back on a 12 to 14 percent growth track is quite simply, the complete alignment of customer needs in singling economies with the hunger of service providers to offer a new range of services and garner new revenues. On the demand side, companies particularly those who directly serve the end customer, are all looking for technologies and processes to get even closer to the customer. A case in point is retailers who are using Geo-positioning on mobile phones to track potential customers even when they drive within a few miles of the store and entice them to the store with offers based on their previous buying history and even their preferences discerned from their Twitter and Facebook behavior. The availability of omni-channel marketing methods coupled with deep analytics to discern spending patterns all combine to make digital capabilities in mobility. Social listening and big data truly critical in the arsenal of the chief marketing officer. Add to this the new capabilities coming through artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality, beacons and sensors n the shop floor and it is easy to realise why the world of the marketer will never be the same again.

For the IT service provider, this has meant a clear need to move from the traditional systems of record where the load on the computer was primarily around record keeping and reporting to systems of insight and systems of engagement. Increasingly, IT services firms are developing user experience and customer experience capabilities and integrating digital interactive agency skills in their value propositions. For a company like Zensar, which has seen the digital component of its revenues grow from single digit to over 25 percent in two years, this has meant a transformation of marketing, execution and even skills to meet the demands of newer and more discerning customers. The narrative of most of the companies in this month has shown that the move to digital transformation is now an inexorable trend across the industry

Coming back to our cricketing metaphor what does this mean to the team that is playing the game, namely the IT Company and the watchers, typically the industry analysts who keep peering through their binoculars to see the game closer and find the next boundary that the industry will hit? The obvious first step is for the coach or CEO to ensure that the whole team is digital ready. In the future, it will not just be a few creative designers or data scientists who will set the stadium on fire, but the entire engagement team, at the client site as well as in offshore campuses in Indian IT cities who will have to demonstrate the skills to talk and deliver digital in every stadium in every part of the world. The good news for traditional Test cricketers unused to the quick pace of IPL has been that they can always wait to play another day but for the new age IT warrior every day will be a digital day and it is essential to understand the rules of this new game and play it well !

Play while you work

In trouble times, Be Safe, Be Happy

Chala Indian, Bill Gates banne!

A place in the sun for digital startups

Digital transformation for many companies in India and also many sectors and companies worldwide has often stopped short of being truly
transformational. For a couple of years, the debate over cyber-security if applications, infrastructure and data moved from the corporate premises to the cloud obfuscated the real cost and flexibility advantages of cloud transitions. And digital readiness was often equated to the number and velocity of mobile apps the corporate IT teams were able to buy and build to enable the company to appear digital in its processes and services.

Mckinsey & Co, in a warning bell sounded for the IT Services industry a few years ago, had predicted that digital attackers, focused on digital solutions that challenged long held dogmas and beliefs would make the services of many incumbents irrelevant or outdates and in many client situations, particularly financial services and retail and increasingly manufacturing and healthcare, the role of start-up “attacker” solutions is increasing, skillfully integrated into the process fabric of the organisation by digital consulting firms that understand both the domain and the digital opportunity.

A couple of examples of such attackers will make the opportunity clear. One major manufacturing company in Western India has already implemented two start-up solutions, Cloud IOT to transform information gathered from devices, sensors and information systems from the shop floor and even after the capital equipment ids installed at the customer site and Cloud Beat which tracks the movement of the product through the demand chain of distributors and dealers through to the end customer. These solutions are putting predictive power in the hands of field service engineers and product marketeers and enabling opportunoiioty share to be maximized for the company and its products.

In the HR space, for organisations across sectors like Manufacturing, Banking, Insurance , Hospitality and IT Services, digital start-ups are challenging larger HR product suites by relegating them to “Systems of Record” status while creating new platforms that enable systems of insight and engagement to be created and deployed. Skills Alpha, one of the newest start-ups from the 5F World stable of digital solutions has found the perfect solution to the problem of motivating millions of millennials who are stuck in seemingly “dead-end” jobs through extensive use of artificial intelligence cognitive and adaptive learning methodologies. Skills Alpha is a platform that uses the best of engagement tools to provide a truly adaptive learning environment for the young learner who is engaged by a “bot” from the minute she gets on to the platform, which enables her to assess her own aspirations and goals, look at alternative learning and career paths and get thoroughly engaged on a journey of content discovery, opportunity exploration and learning throughout her tenure in the organisation.

A sound argument exists for a new generation of start-ups focused on Business to Business solutions Cloud Beat and Cloud IOT or in the case of Skills Alpha, on Business to Business to Consumer ideas. Across a variety of horizontal functions like learning, sales productivity improvement, financial skills and vertical domain areas like loan management, actuarial services and digital community development and deployment in organisations, the discussion has moved from custom built or packages software to multi-tenant platforms and micro-services that can be incorporated in the business and technology architecture of future organisations. Starts-ups powered by mastery of new technologies and research into trends in key business and industry sectors are mastering the new space of digital platform engineering, forcing traditional vendors to ambidextrously look for new innovative platform solutions to take to market while continuing to incrementally change internal and external business processes and systems in client organisations.

On the main theme of digital transformation itself, it is time for businesses and CXOs to look beyond anecdotal evidence of social media , mobile apps and digital marketing success stories reported by their teams and demand true transformation. This will happen through completely recrafting the digital jorneys of customers, supply and demand chain partners and employees and will need, in large measure, deliberate investments in process reengineering, culture and mind shift changes to support the array of digital technologies that are available for deployment. In many large corporations, the digital imperative and the opportunities to partner extensively and thoughtfully with start-ups to deliver the transformation have become topics for board room discussion – not a month too soon for that !

Robotic Process Automation - Changing Jobs Forever

The three big challenges for all global business corporations today are protectionism, digital transformation and automation. How the forces of protectionism play out will be determined by the rigor and scope of visa restrictions that are already in play in the USA, Europe Singapore and parts of the Arab world and digital transformation is a catharsis that most companies are addressing, some with positive “winner takes all” enthusiasm and others with trepidation, wondering if they can catch up with the leaders. But what is most nerve wracking, not just for firm level strategists but also for industry associations and Governments seeking to protect and boost jobs is the rapid advance in Artificial Intelligence and automation – through robotics and shop floor automation in manufacturing and through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the automation of knowledge processes.

Most services organisations, ranging from Government to Financial Services to IT Services and Business Process Management have many functions where there are a large number of repetitive transactions. RPA has the power to save time and money and also minimize the cost of rework and inaccuracies by automating and enhancing the efficiency of these transactions on a large scale. It may not be an exaggeration to say that in the next three years, in India itself a possible million jobs or more are at risk and planners will have to work at redeployment to higher value adding work to avoid a potential jobs crisis.

The Institute for Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence has defined RPA as the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems. “Just as industrial robots are remaking the manufacturing industry by creating higher production rates and improved quality, RPA “robots” are revolutionizing the way we think about and administer business processes, IT support processes, workflow processes, remote infrastructure and back-office work” says the institute.

A classic example of RPA lies in the way Robotic Advisory services will work in the near future. A scenario built by a research group at McKinsey & Co compares the present cumbersome process to what it could become. The Regional Manager of the Investment Advisory firms most of us deal with typically gets investment ideas from the CIO and defines an investment opportunity that fits the client’s appetite. After trying to call, he sends a recommendation mail or in some places further obsessed with security, sends a formal letter. The letter is ignored for a few days and after some gentle prods, the client calls or mails back with some specific tax queries. After a few more days of internal consultations at the advisory firm, the client and consultant finally confer to take a “Go-No Go” call on the investment idea. With Robotic Advisory, the artificial intelligence and deep learning systems will have the ability to automatically identify the investment opportunity and push it to the smart phone of the client. The client is provided a graphical representation of the impact this investment could have on his portfolio, which piques his interest enough to do a call with a robotic advisor to resolve tax queries. In an exceptional situation, the call could be routed through an Uber-like Expert finding protocol for a quick chat with the nearest available expert anywhere in the world and the decision could be arrived at within ten minutes of initiating the transaction compared to ten days or more in the traditional case. Imagine the efficiency benefits but also give a thought to the number of people who could be replaced!

RPA is fast beginning to find application across a variety of applications in financial services, claims processing in insurance, a whole raft of Government to Citizen interfaces and the entire area of Information Technology support and management services. Automated management of IT infrastructure enables faster process throughput and order of magnitude improvement in the efficiency of service desk operations with self-service becoming the norm rather than the exception. Automation software at the presentation layer provides an attractive user interface that mimics and enhances the rules of erstwhile human interface processes without compromising the existing IT architecture. RPA enables all functionality to be replicated and in some cases enhanced with unlimited capacity to meet variable demand. RPA will expedite back-office tasks in finance, procurement, supply chain management, accounting, customer service and human resources, including data entry, purchase order issuance and all interfaces and better user experiences that demand simultaneous access to large data lakes and multiple contiguous information systems built by the organisation.

To take a final example from the HR and learning space, the IT sector is now engaged with the agenda to re-train two million managers and new entrants in multiple skill streams needed for the new digital world. Since the scale will be beyond the capabilities of traditional training departments, RPA solutions will have to be employed to gauge aptitude, build a learning path and crawl through the multiple content sources available on the internet to stack up learning modules chosen to fit the interest area and learning style of each individual.

Robotic Process Automation is here today and expanding fast. How we leverage the benefits will determine the winners and also-rans of the new digital era for corporations and Governments.

Spreading the joy of doing good

Some years ago, one of India’s best writers and thinkers Gurcharan Das wrote his epic on the Mahabharata epic titled “The difficulty of being good.” Delving deep into the dilemmas of Yuddhisthtar, the book which is a must-read for all social and corporate thinkers brought out in many ways how doing and being good is no easy task in a world where opportunism and expediency lead most people to devious thinking and action. However, today it does appear that the impetus and the opportunities for doing good have become stronger in our country and as a society, we have the possibilities of making significant and enduring changes happen!

Three events in the last few weeks have given me this conviction that there is a true coalition for good happening in various parts of the country which can be tapped. The first was in my own karma bhoomi of Pune where the Social Venture Partners group has now crossed over fifty well-meaning individuals ranging from well-known industrialists to young social workers and college lecturers. The enthusiasm this group possesses is truly contagious and our structure embraces true venture philanthropy principles in a professional yet friendly manner. An active grants search and review committee, a partner nominations and engagement committee and engaged lead partners for each NGO we support with time, money and mentorship ensures that the good intentions all of us have is translated to a sense of purpose and action on the ground. The national board of SVP which is championing the Million Jobs Mission in the country and the global board of SDVP which is making social change happen in multiple countries area all vindications of the theme of spreading goodwill and good societal actions. The second epiphany for me was the popularity that the work of Pune City Connect now enjoys and the eagerness of well-meaning citizens within and outside the city to share in its activities and success. The Young Indians group of CII Pune had invited the Pune Municipal Commissioner and I to share our thoughts on what could be a worthwhile social agenda and have readily agreed to spearhead the engagement processes with various segments of society to ensure wide spread participation in the exciting programs of Skills Lighthouses, Municipal School Transformation, hundred percent digital literacy for Pune and City Transformation support. We can and will make it a city-wide movement.

The third exciting development has been the warm welcome extended to me and the CEO of Pune City Connect Ruchi Mathur in the lovely city of Aurangabad when we visited to explain the progress in the PCC collaboration with PMC in Pune. The Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Standing Committee Chairman, Commissioner, industry leaders and mentors, members of the academic community and civil society listened to our experiences with rapt attention and have committed to make a similar initiative successful in their city. Add to this their interest in projecting the tourism opportunities in that city and we can see an environment of good initiatives leading to great outcomes in that. city this year.

So, what really is happening here? The opportunities for spreading good work are getting created everywhere and there are many causes we can attribute this to. First and foremost is the confidence in strong political leadership that is emerging in all our minds which will provide the space and the freedom to build the inclusive India that is there in all our aspirations. GST, a better enforced tax regime and the accelerating growth of the economy will all provide the “feel good” factor that loosens the purse strings of the rich members of the corporate community and enables more money to flow through to the masses. The social consciousness that campaigns like NDTV’s Behtar India and many others are bringing to all segment of society, particularly young students in our schools and colleges will also ensure that the youth of the country is willing to step out and do good and also raise their voices in support of good movements. And this spirit of collective endeavor can quickly spread and pervade allcorners of our vast country.

I still recall my early school days in the dusty villages of Tatisilwai and Namkum in Bihar (now Jharkhand) where my father, Late Shri Ganapati Natarajan ran a company called Waxpol Industries and spent most of his spare time running a “Seva Kendra” for the underprivileged. My sister and I had the privilege of participating in this initiative throughout our school years and this instilled in us the natural aspiration to do what we could to serve the people and bring every citizen to an active participation level in the village and state. In later years, this encouraged me to start our family foundation the Natarajan Education Society to serve the same objective. Today, with NASSCOM Foundation, Social Venture Partners, Pune City Connect and NES, my social cup of joy is overflowing. Thereby stems the belief that every citizen of the country can and should have the opportunity to participate and make this country the best place for all its citizens.

What do millennials really want ?

I had the privilege in January and February to present some thought provoking research done by our company Skills Alpha on the art and science of motivating millennials in organisations. The IMA, led by Adit Jain and Radha Ahluwalia and possibly one of the most engaging forums for CEOs CFOs and CHROs in the country hosted three workshops with over a hundred heads of HR in Mumbai Delhi and Bengaluru to discuss the research and agree on methods to keep young recruits motivated and engaged in organisations. Some fascinating insights have emerged which is now finding its way into the skilling platforms we are building for key customers in India and abroad.

There are flaws in the approach that most of us over the age of forty or fifty take when we address the new needs of the millennials. The refrain is always “when I was your age” extolling the virtues of hard work with no distractions, loyalty to family and one’s first employers and respect for seniority and authority. And with a few exceptions, most parents of teenagers and new job entrants have a tendency to live out their own unfulfilled ambitions through their children. Many well-meaning and well-off parents are happy to write or at least enhance the college admission essays of their kids and willing to put them on flights to the US (Trump willing) for college and even high school to get them out of the rat race of competitive education in our country. And after doing all this, should they not, they feel, be entitled to feel aggrieved if their children want to deviate from the parental script and strike out on their own path of learning and discovery?

Our research shows that people below the age of thirty-five, the classical category we call millennials are quite happy to be just left alone and do what they really want to do rather than being cajoled, coaxed or coerced to do what somebody else in the family wants them to do. In fact, most elders today would happily praise their own millennial children, nephews and nieces and grandchildren for their bright spirit of questioning and multitude of interests but be unwilling to tolerate this in the office. We tend to forget that most millennials have been brought up in single child or small nuclear families, reasonable pampered and indulged at key points in their growing up. They have been encouraged to have a wide circle of friends, question the status quo in school and college and continually expand their interests and have a variety of experiences. All this leads them to develop a very YOLO view of life (You Only Live Once) and when they enter the work environment, to seek a strong work-life balance and continue to pursue multiple interests and possibly career options.

The experience that my wife Uma and I have had with our own millennial, our daughter Karuna bears out the value of giving the youth of today ample independence and being supportive rather than judgmental of their life and work decisions. Karuna grew up in Pondicherry, Nashik, Delhi and Pune and completed her ICSE from the Maneckji Cooper School in Mumbai. Deciding to pursue a dream to become a Physician Scientist in one of the top hospitals in the world, Karuna chose to excel in academics and extra-curricular pursuits and got into the IB program at the United World College in the US. With admissions in MIT, Yale Princeton and Cambridge, she chose to do a MB PhD at Cambridge UK, went back to the US to do a Post Doc in Harvard Medical and then did a Fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York where she has recently accepted a full-time appointment to be a physician scientist. Given our own backgrounds of having studied and worked in India most of our lives and specialized in IT and Education, it would have been well-nigh impossible for us to advise Karuna on the career path she chose, but by letting her follow her heart and choose a path that would enable very little supervision by us, we have been proud to see her blossom and achieve whatever success she has in her field of chosen endeavor.

Lest any reader of this column treat this as a sermon on how to bring up children today, let me haste to add that there is no magic formula for showing young people the path to success. Each millennial is unique and her life experiences and level of ambition would be completely different from others. At Skills Alpha, we recognize this as an imperative to build sensing and adaptable learning environments to suit the aspirations and learning style of each individual. The use of Smart Bots, deep learning, analytics and adaptive and cognitive technologies to customize career management and skilling recommendations enable the unique needs to be addressed. Similarly, at home and office we must celebrate the unique characteristics of the new generation and millennial job seekers. Give them the freedom of their own time and space, provide them the tools to customize the inputs they receive in their academic and corporate environment, and the results will astound you. Give the new millennials a chance!

My Books

From Start-Up to Global Success

The global authority of the West is no longer unchallenged; the Western worldview is no longer accepted as universal. It is increasingly being questioned by emerging economies around the globe that are developing their own standards. If we look at the geographical positions of the emerging economies, it appears that they collectively form a belt around the southern part of the globe: "The Global Southern Belt."
The Westerncentric world is fading into a multicentered world in which many countries and even more important, "a world of cities" will set the tone in global matters. The game changers will be the countries and cities of the Global Southern Belt, which will reshape our world in the decades to come.
Like John Naisbitt's international bestselling book Megatrends in 1982, Global Game Change offers an indispensable roadmap of the transforming global landscape. It replaces the uncertainty of rapid change with a description of the future.

What We Really Want? (Aspirations of Gen Y)

A book for IT professionals, young aspirants, managers, parents, social researchers and observant readers.
Millions of bright young minds are driving India's vibrant IT sector. There shall be millions more who will succeed them. Therefore this book!
What do Gen Y members aspire for? How can they turn their dreams into reality? What role should their parents play? How can the IT industry captains and managers make it a collaborative endeavour?

Winds of Change

Indian IT- an insider's view In this book, that will prove to be of immense practical value to IT professionals and entrepreneurs, Ganesh Natarajan, an insider in the IT industry, journeys through the situations and experiences that proved to be the make and break factors over this crucial period. This book is a guide that provides indicators about what works, what fails and what needs to be done.

Unleashing the Knowledge ForceHarnessing Knowledge for Building Global Companies

This book traces the impact of knowledge force in the early stages of a business and throws light on the different frameworks of knowledge force relevant to businesses. Further it presents a new Knowledge Management Maturity Model (KMMM) for describing different stages of knowledge maturity in keeping with the phase of business growth. The applicability of the model across various industry sectors is also discussed.

Knowledge ManagementEnabling Business Growth

This is a breakthrough book that explains how technological and conceptual synergies can be deployed for conversion of knowledge to knowledge management in the organisational context. Written by professionals who have tremendous expertise in consulting and developing KM solutions, it captures the essence of the times that is being referred to as the dawn of the knowledge society.

Inspired!

Inspired! breaks new ground by exploring the essence of inspiration in a series of interviews with exceptional individuals some of whom lead regular lives like us while many are renowned leaders in diverse fields such as business, social activism, education, sport, the government, the arts and the media. Ganesh Natarajan and Manjiri Gokhale take us through the life and times of each personality - the formative influences and events that moulded them, their styles of operation and philosophies of life, their dreams, their hopes, their accomplishments - then identify the ten qualities that have been the key ingredients in their success. From this emerges a unique formula for inspiration that may be adapted and customized according to the special requirements of each individual. The book will be a valuable and entertaining guide to all those who wish to optimize their talents, transform their circle of influence and succeed in what they do, whatever their age or profession - corporate executives, artistes, homemakers, entrepreneurs, even students.

Implementing BPRAn Agenda for the CEO

For most business managers, corporate heads and leaders of organizations, Business Process Reengineering is no longer a mystery. It is an opportunity, to chart out a new future for the organization, to destroy or obliterate age old systems that are too slow to function in the IT era. Reengineering is an imperative to sail the organization through turbulent business storms and to reach it safely, much closer to the customer, and the market.

Business Process Reengineering

One of the most prevalent concepts in the business today, reengineering involves a fundamental rethinking and redesigning in the way we work. This book, one of the very first to emerge from India reveals a fascinating picture of what BPR can do to totally revitalise the corporation and not only that but also how to do it. Brimming with real-life examples of reengineering in the India and aboard, this book written by top information strategy specialist explains the genesis of the concept of BPR and tells you how information technology, if used imaginatively, can be a vehicle of change.